Opinion: Where Do You Stand on the N-Word?

The Education of History

There is a great clamour for education, education that changes the circumstances of a person, lifting them out of situations that tell a compelling story of social mobility where the success we see today is far from the lowly beginnings that will resonate and offer hope to others.

However, with education, I adjure you to get history, a sense of history, the lessons of history that will hopefully ensure that you have learnt from the mistakes of the past and can build on the foundations that were laid before.

Those who carry that sense of history when celebrated can find such inspiring words as were spoken by Oprah Winfrey when she was inducted into the NAACP Hall of Fame in 2005[YouTube] – “Because they were the seed of the free, and because they were the seed I get to be the fruit.”

Getting the Perspective of the N-Word

Beyond the uproar that accompanied the means-profiling of Oprah Winfrey in Switzerland in that CBS-ET interview there is an even more significant aspect of the interview that is being lost, it is in the use and the context of the N-word. See the later part of that video.

This is what Oprah Winfrey had to say:

“I do not run in the circle of people who use the word loosely or use the word because for me, it is out of respect to those people for whom that was the last word they heard while they were being hung, it’s the last word they heard when they were being fired, it’s the last word they heard when their house was being burnt, it’s the last word … it’s the word they heard every day when walking down the street, when they had to step off the sidewalk and let other people pass.”

She concluded by saying, “I owe them the responsibility and honour by not trying to denigrate them as they were by using that word.”

There is no other history for the N-Word

The N-word is loaded with history that some of us have never learnt and those who have learnt have easily forgotten, but the memory of those it was not a few generations ago to bear the humiliation, carry the repudiation and live the seething hate that denigrated a people to almost insignificance cannot be abolished to a trend and fad that is gaining currency amongst our youth – a people without a history are a people bereft of roots, swept around like clouds in turbulent winds without stay or anchor.

No, my friends, we do have history, documented and living history that should hold a significance in the journey of life that we experience from a record of our ancestry to the gifts that we bequeath those who follow us – there is no respect in the N-word, it cannot be gentrified away from the seed, the tree and the fruits that have ripened and been eaten by those who revelled before as the necks of those before us bore the yokes we can never imagine or fully understand.

If there is anything that we can take away from this, it is that there is no other parallel history of the N-word that means nice, beautiful, acceptable, honoured, revered or desired.

Standing as 10,000

Oprah Winfrey sadly appears to misquote Maya Angelou in Our Grandmothers when she says, “I come as one, but stand as ten thousand”, it is no less significant in the misquote or paraphrase, it is laden with meaning and a clear perspective of history, knowing the road she has walked and where she has arrived today.

This is what the part of that poem says:

No one, no, nor no one million
ones dare deny me God, I go forth
alone, and stand as ten thousand.

Where Do You Stand?

The question then remains, shall we - with the sense of history that underpins the present in which we stand on the shoulders of the many who marched, walked, talked, prayed, were harassed, were beaten, were murdered and were martyred for the cause that gives us the humanity we now enjoy – go forth alone and stand as ten thousand for the shame and humiliation they suffered by celebrating the name that made our history so blackened by suffering and denigration as our new identity?

I say again, with education, get history and with history, get enlightenment for the N-word was given to call our grandmothers worse than the master’s dog, it must not cross our lips again, if we really know who we are.

Our Grandmothers - Maya Angelou

I am publishing this poem in a blog acknowledging the work of Maya Angelou and the full context of the history that lies behind the N-word, it talks of the generations that bore the brunt of the hate and humiliation that we have so easily forgotten for an odious trend of identity that signifies we have lost our roots and have become a nation of people bereft of a storied ancestry.

An anthology of her poems appears here.

Our Grandmothers

She lay, skin down in the moist dirt,
the canebrake rustling
with the whispers of leaves,
and loud longing of hounds and
the ransack of hunters crackling the near branches.

She muttered, lifting her head a nod toward freedom,
I shall not, I shall not be moved.

She gathered her babies,
their tears slick as oil on black faces,
their young eyes canvassing mornings of madness.
Momma, is Master going to sell you from us tomorrow?

Yes.
Unless you keep walking more and talking less.
Yes.
Unless the keeper of our lives releases me from all commandments.
Yes.
And your lives,
never mine to live,
will be executed upon the killing floor of innocents.
Unless you match my heart and words,
saying with me,

I shall not be moved.

In Virginia tobacco fields,
leaning into the curve of Steinway
pianos, along Arkansas roads,
in the red hills of Georgia,
into the palms of her chained hands,
she cried against calamity,
You have tried to destroy me and though I perish daily,

I shall not be moved.

Her universe,
often summarized into one black body
falling finally from the tree to her feet,
made her cry each time into a new voice.
All my past hastens to defeat,
and strangers claim the glory of my love,
Iniquity has bound me to his bed.

Yet, I must not be moved.

She heard the names,
swirling ribbons in the wind of history:
nigger, nigger bitch, heifer,
mammy, property, creature, ape, baboon,
whore, hot tail, thing, it.
She said, but my description cannot fit your tongue,
for I have a certain way of being in this world,

And I shall not, I shall not be moved.

No angel stretched protecting wings above the heads of her children,
fluttering and urging the winds of reason into the confusions of their lives.
The sprouted like young weeds,
but she could not shield their growth
from the grinding blades of ignorance, nor
shape them into symbolic topiaries.
She sent them away,
underground, overland, in coaches and
shoeless.

When you learn, teach.
When you get, give.
As for me,

I shall not be moved.

She stood in mid-ocean, seeking dry land.
She searched God's face.
Assured,
she placed her fire of service
on the altar, and though
clothed in the finery of faith,
when she appeared at the temple door,
no sign welcomed
Black Grandmother, Enter here.

Into the crashing sound,
into wickedness, she cried,
No one, no, nor no one million
ones dare deny me God, I go forth
alone, and stand as ten thousand.

The Divine upon my right
impels me to pull forever
at the latch on Freedom's gate.

The Holy Spirit upon my left leads my
feet without ceasing into the camp of the
righteous and into the tents of the free.

These momma faces, lemon-yellow, plum-purple,
honey-brown, have grimaced and twisted
down a pyramid for years.
She is Sheba the Sojourner,
Harriet and Zora,
Mary Bethune and Angela,
Annie to Zenobia.

She stands
before the abortion clinic,
confounded by the lack of choices.
In the Welfare line,
reduced to the pity of hand-outs.
Ordained in the pulpit, shielded
by the mysteries.
In the operating room,
husbanding life.
In the choir loft,
holding God in her throat.
On lonely street corners,
hawking her body.
In the classroom, loving the
children to understanding.

Centered on the world's stage,
she sings to her loves and beloveds,
to her foes and detractors:
However I am perceived and deceived,
however my ignorance and conceits,
lay aside your fears that I will be undone,

For I shall not be moved.

An interpretation of Islam lost in the embrace of a house slave

I never taught you

A good friend of mine about 12 years ago asked me for an academic reference to complete an application for a university course. I was at first surprised that I was asked for such a reference indicating I needed to manufacture a story of how I observed and assessed him academically.

I had in some ways been a mentor but that did not make me his teacher or lecturer, I could however give him a character reference which in all honestly and for all intents and purposes would be glowing and commendable that readers would be interested in him.

An argument ensued that ended up in my being called a coconut to which I retorted, it was the not the exclusive preserve of the white man to be objective – I almost had my head torn off.

Owning the house and the field

As the conversation cooled down, I had an interesting question thrown at me, it went – Are you a field slave or a house slave? [1]

It did not take me long to answer back that I was neither and if I did have anything to do with that sort of thing, I would probably be someone to own a field and house slave.

That was my first real exposure to the fact that the black race is not one homogenous identity and one collection of people, we all differ in our heritage, societies, communities, upbringing and outlook.

More interestingly, it showed how blacks from different cultures have tried to identify with blacks of other cultures and subsumed themselves to histories and cultures that have no semblance to their heritage.

Skin colour is only a visual identity it does not offer anything close to a shared heritage and we should be careful not to be caught up in such false identities in the quest for assumed brotherliness.

Understanding my own heritage

I had to check myself the other day in Amsterdam when someone thought he was racially abusing me by calling me a nigger – without catching a breath, I replied, I do not understand that term, I am free-born African.

In other words, even though I was born in the UK and have a British passport, I also have a Nigerian heritage where when I was growing up my blackness was always part of me that I feel so comfortable in my skin any abuse simply presents an opportunity for any education [2] rather than fall into a fit of uncontrollable anger and more abuse which many expect.

So, it was interesting to read that Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al-Qaeda had the most derogatory stuff to say [3] about President-elect Obama when he called him a house-negro. It exposed more of the ignorance of Al-Qaeda than the little understood heritage of Barack Obama.

Fatherly duties matter for impartation

Being born of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, there is no way Barack Obama would have been that acquainted with the realities of those who really did descend from slaves who were yanked out of Africa hundreds of years ago into so hostile a society that made animals of human beings.

He might have had an identity crisis but the worthy contributions of the maternal line of his heritage made him what he has become and we can all be grateful for that. President-elect Obama ran as an American who just happens to be black, NOT as a black man who happens to be an American – we need to get that distinction very, very clear.

Much as the Al-Qaeda stooge tried to play on Barack Obama’s supposed Muslim heritage, he seemed to forget that bequeathing a religion to a child includes the father being around to nurture the child.

Obama’s father was an absent father, a negligent father and someone who contributed very little to helping shape the identity and outlook of his son – I would suppose there is nothing that requires a father take responsibility in those matters of child development in the mind of Al-Qaeda and that it is best for the child to show the utmost ingratitude to those who poured themselves into the child to make him the success that he has become – they being Christian.

Muslim crimes and kafir exploits

Furthermore, I am concerned about that the other development that portrays Islam in even worse light, Somali Islamists are pursuing the pirates that took the Saudi-owned super-tanker on the premise that hijacking a Muslim owned ship is a major crime [4]. Bunkum!

A crime is a crime regardless of the religion or the victim, to consider that offending non-Muslims is a lesser crime than offending Muslims might be a matter of conscience but in has no place in modern-day civilisation.

If such hair-splitting analyses of heinous crimes are becoming the brand of Islam that has the louder voice, I would contend that Islam has nothing good to offer humanity and it should come under the siege of tolerant and reasonable sanction till it begins to see its greater function in the wider world.

The concept of Muslim crimes and kafir [5] exploits is abhorrent to the extreme, it is unimaginably callous and it must be completely unIslamic until I am told otherwise, it is out of kilter with civilised expression.

I know Muslims too

I also have a Muslim heritage [6], my paternal grandfather was a Muslim and he was the most reasonable and tolerant man I have met in the matters of religion; he married a Christian wife and of the 6 children he had, their religious inclinations came down to three on either side.

We celebrated both religious festivals with goodwill, good humour and reverence on all sides and there was never a time when we the Christians were treated with any contempt or lesser consideration with respect to our other relations that were Muslim.

I expect the well-meaning Islamic intelligentsia and elders around the world to condemn in the most severe terms this endorsement of lawlessness against non-Muslims – a crime should be a crime regardless of inclination or adherence, this kind of view must not gain traction.

All religion must be in aid and service of humanity or it has no place amongst us; I hope that message becomes the cornerstone of every creed, gospel, faith, affirmation or religion practiced anywhere in this whole wide world.

Sources

[1] House slave - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[2] Do Africans still live on trees? [akin.blog-city.com]

[3] BBC NEWS | Middle East | Al-Qaeda vows to hurt Obama's US

[4] BBC NEWS | Africa | Somali Islamists 'hunt pirates'

[5] Kafir - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[6] The people are high on opium - III [akin.blog-city.com]